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Still Pinteresque

Harold Pinter wrote the script for the remake of Sleuth, and he briefly appears in it, too.Credit
Steven Forrest/Insight-Visuals, for The New York Times

LONDON

TOWARD the end of the new film version of “Sleuth,” a cellphone suddenly rings. The sound is as jarring as gunfire, and it deepens the tension in a scene between Milo (Jude Law), an out-of-work-actor who is not as dumb as he looks, and Andrew (Michael Caine), a famous thriller writer with a cruel streak.

The caller is Milo’s lover, Maggie, who also happens to be Andrew’s wife. “I love you too,” Milo coos into the phone, looking at Andrew.

But what did Maggie say on the other end? The director, Kenneth Branagh, asked that of the screenwriter, Harold Pinter, in rehearsal, and it was a natural question; in “Sleuth” reality is elusive, and the truth is often little more than an opportunistic weapon.

The response was not particularly satisfying, but it was classically Pinteresque.

“Harold said to me, ‘Who said it was Maggie?’” Mr. Branagh said, laughing as he recalled it. “He said, ‘We know that the phone rings and that he appears to be having a conversation. ’ ”

That forced leap of the imagination is part of the mystery and challenge of Mr. Pinter’s work, so singular and unclassifiable that it has its own adjective. (The Financial Times, for one, defined Pinteresque as “full of dark hints and pregnant suggestions, with the audience left uncertain as to what to conclude.”)

“I don’t make judgments about my own work, and I don’t analyze it; I just let it happen,” Mr. Pinter said in an interview here recently. “That applies to everything I’ve done. I do tend to think that I’ve written a great deal out of my unconscious because half the time I don’t know what a given character is going to say next.”

Photo

Michael Caine, left, and Laurence Olivier in the original Sleuth."Credit
Everett Collection

Mr. Pinter writes in a handsome study on the second floor of a two-story brownstone in west London, just behind the house he shares with his wife, the writer Lady Antonia Fraser. Tucked in a corner of the downstairs office is a table covered with awards he has amassed in his career as a playwright, director, actor, political provocateur, poet and screenwriter, including the French Légion d’Honneur, the Franz Kafka Award and the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

A huge portrait of a younger, vigorous Mr. Pinter playing cricket, one of his great passions, dominates a wall upstairs. The painted Mr. Pinter, poised to swing his bat, has a wicked glint in his eye; testosterone all but flies off the canvas. The real Mr. Pinter, who turns 77 this month, is frailer now. In the last five years, he has beaten back both cancer of the esophagus and an autoimmune disorder called pemphigus, and he walks tentatively, using a cane, on legs that have gone weak. But he is as mentally robust, as full of righteous rage, as ever.

Mr. Pinter said several years ago that he would not write any more plays, but his work is revived so often that his assertion seems almost beside the point. In the past year “The Hothouse,”“The Dumb Waiter” and “Betrayal” have been presented in London; “The Homecoming” is being performed on Broadway this fall, with a cast led by Ian McShane (“Deadwood”).

“Sleuth” — a remake of an earlier film that itself was based on the 1970 play by Anthony Shaffer — is due to be released on Friday. Mr. Pinter had never seen Mr. Shaffer’s “Sleuth,” but when he was approached by Mr. Law (who is also one of the film’s producers), he read the script and was intrigued by the idea at its center: the notion of two men locked in a psychological battle whose proximate cause is a woman. He then set about making the story his own.

Shorter than its predecessor, the new “Sleuth” is also less wordy, creepier, darker. While the first film was flamboyant, the new “Sleuth” is full of spare, sometimes cryptic language, significant pauses and another familiar quality of Mr. Pinter’s work: a hint of menace lurking beneath the surface.

“I would suggest that the old piece is about game playing and the new piece is about men fighting,” Mr. Law said. (Mr. Caine appeared in the original film, as the younger man, Milo; Laurence Olivier played Andrew.)

“It hints at Harold’s opinion of war,” Mr. Law added. “Man’s primal instinct is to fight, and sometimes we lose sight of what we’re fighting over.”

Much of Mr. Pinter’s work concerns power — who has it, who doesn’t, where it comes from, how it can shift. That is very much the case here.

Photo

Mr. Caine with Jude Law in the remake of "Sleuth," written by Mr. Pinter.Credit
David Appleby/Sony Pictures Classics

If you watch closely, you can see the playwright himself on screen for a moment of “Sleuth,” in a scene in which Andrew is watching a television movie of one of his books. (Mr. Pinter began his career as an actor and has never stopped; he performed Beckett’s one-man play “Krapp’s Last Tape” at the Royal Court Theater last year.) Mr. Pinter’s character is identified in the screenplay as “the interrogator.” “I’m always the interrogator,” Mr. Pinter said. “When I was an actor in rep, I always played sinister parts. The directors always said, ‘If there’s a nasty man about, cast Harold Pinter.’”

Asked whether he thought that every interaction was in part a fight for the upper hand, Mr. Pinter said he believed it was, “to one degree or another.” He added: “The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others. It’s escalated, and there’s a basic indifference to human fate on the part of authoritarian systems, which I believe exists not in a faraway country necessarily but here and now in this country.”

If the personal and the political sometimes merge for Mr. Pinter, the events of the last few years — his illness, his Nobel Prize, the celebrations of his prodigious body of work — have tended to happen in a blur, too. Leaving Dublin two years ago after a retrospective marking his 75th birthday, Mr. Pinter slipped on the pavement at the airport and gashed his head. The next day he learned he had won the Nobel. And then, at home writing his Nobel lecture, he got a call from his doctor. The news was bad; Mr. Pinter needed to go to the hospital immediately.

The ambulance was already on its way, but Mr. Pinter managed to finish writing the lecture. He was briefly released from the hospital to deliver it, which he did from a wheelchair on a bare stage at a London television studio, obviously ill, a blanket across his lap, his voice hoarse but steady. The lecture was a blistering indictment of American foreign policy, and it gave Mr. Pinter a world stage for his political views, which over the years have included protests against the NATO bombing of Serbia, censorship, the gulf war and the war in Iraq.

Mr. Pinter reserves much of his great outrage for the United States. In his Nobel address, he said it was guilty of “systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless” crimes. “You have to hand it to America,” he said. “It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.”

Mr. Pinter, who last visited the United States in 2001, for a festival of his work in New York, refuses to go back. But he has prodigious charm to go along his irascibility, and he related an anecdote that hints at somewhat more complicated feelings, or at least proves he can laugh at himself.

About 20 years ago he traveled to Nicaragua as a guest of the Sandinista government and had to change planes in Miami on his way back. “So I joined the line to Immigration, and there’s a very big woman on my line, and I knew she was going to ask me, ‘What were you doing in Nicaragua?’ and I was going to say, ‘Mind your own damn business.’

“So I got up there, and she opened my passport, and she said, ‘Are you the Harold Pinter?’ And I said yes, and she said, ‘Welcome to the United States!’

He says he doesn’t mind, really, getting older. “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light?” he said. “There isn’t much point.”

His latest work, a slim pamphlet called “Six Poems for A.,” comprises poems written over 32 years, with “A” of course being Lady Antonia. The first of the poems was written in Paris, where she and Mr. Pinter traveled soon after they met. More than three decades later the two are rarely apart, and Mr. Pinter turns soft, even cozy, when he talks about his wife.

Mr. Pinter has one son from his first marriage, to the actress Vivien Merchant. He and his son have not spoken in 14 years, and his efforts to reach out have been rebuffed, Mr. Pinter said. “There it is,” he said.

But he is lucky, he added, to have “inherited” Lady Antonia’s six children, who among them have produced 17 grandchildren. They all call him Grandpa.

Mr. Pinter acknowledged that his plays — full of infidelity, cruelty, inhumanity, the lot — seem at odds with his domestic contentment.

“How can you write a happy play?” he said. “Drama is about conflict and general degrees of perturbation, disarray. I’ve never been able to write a happy play, but I’ve been able to enjoy a happy life.”